Appy Hour -Speech4Good

On the 5th day of posting this Speech Lady gave to me, an appy hour for disfluency!

The generous people over at Balbus Speech provided me with a code to try out their app Speech4Good.   When I first saw this app nightmares of Speech Science classes came flooding back.  Speech Science was the one class that never clicked with me.  So needless to say I was thinking how the heck am I going to use this app.  I was surprised at the number of possibilities I came across as I used and played around with this app. 

Speech4Good can be used for a number of different purposes. 
-Disfluency
-Inarticulation
-Easy Onset
-Vocal quality including pitch and intensity
-Prosody

The home screen looks like this:

The SpeechCenter takes you to the oscilloscope (a.k.a. speech graph) where you can record sessions, keep data and use Delayed Auditory Feedback (DAF).  DAF is a speech therapy technique used mostly with individuals who stutter, have Parkinson's or other voice disorders.  The DAF in Speech4Good takes voice input and outputs it at an adjustable time, generally milliseconds of time, so that you can naturally slow down your rate of speech to increase awareness of changes in your speech.  Below is a screen shot of the SpeechCenter. 

Below are some different speech graph views.

One of the children that I used this has difficulty with prosody.  He has a very monotone voice, so we work on inflections in general conversation as well as when asking questions.  This was a great tool to use to compare speech graph views.  I said a sentence and then he would try to match the sentence.  In the end we wanted our speech graph to look similar.  This was also helpful in increasing the intensity of his voice.  Those soft-spoken students have to match their speech graph to yours (my loud and obnoxious SLP voice).  I don't currently have any students who demonstrate disfluencies, but I played around a lot with this app and will be extremely excited to use it when I get a child working on fluency.   The visual representation is an integral part of therapy for any child or adult. 

The rest of the homescreen offers a library where you store past speech graphs and recordings. 

It also has an option for sharing.  You can share your speech graphs through email, Facebook, Twitter.  I'm not so sure I would use the Facebook or Twitter option, but email for sure.  Telepractice is becoming such a growing part of our field.  Imagine your patients could send you speech graphs so you can monitor and track their progress. 

The Lite app is offered for $4.99.  The difference in the Lite app is that you cannot record.  The regular app is $19.99 and you can buy it here. 

Have any of you used this app? If so what are your favorite features?